Castles & Crusades, OSR, and What I Play

Castles & Crusades is still one of my go-to fantasy games. It feels just like classic AD&D, but with many modern improvements to simplify the game to play from 3x5 cards. I don't need any 5E-like OSR games; while they are fun, they don't do it all like C&C does - while still feeling like a classic experience.

It is a mix between 3E and 2E that feels right, and so many of the "charts needed to play" simply do not exist in this game - you don't need them. You have a character card and 90% of what you need to know. If you want to unify the target numbers, set them all to 18 and give +6 to primaries.

The 5E OSR clones (Shadowdark, Low Fantasy Gaming, and a few others) strip the experience down and try to provide the OSR experience through a 5E lens, which is fantastic. Those games have beautiful art and are real collector's items, but another part of me feels I have been down the niche OSR and 5E road a few times. I am not really feeling the excitement for Shadowdark, it looks fantastic, but I have shelves full of amazing OSR games I never play. I wish Shadowdark the best and hope they become a de-facto 5E OSR-style experience for many.

I have a lot of OSR games I like much better, and I have too many of them to play.

Old School Essentials does everything OSR and more, with the only difference being mechanics. I am not playing OSE, but this still stays on my shelves since it is such an incredible experience and set of rules. I can see why someone would prefer Shadowdark over OSE; infravision proliferation exists in every fantasy race except humans and halflings. There comes the point in 5E and a lot of games where "easy" takes over, and everyone wants to see in the dark, and then the referee has to account for some races having 60' or 90' ranges, and no one picks humans or non-night vision races because "who wants to be carrying torches around?"

The Shadowdark game addresses this fatal flaw and makes light sources a part of the game, which touches on our fears of the dark and that primal instinct. I like that game designers are starting to recognize this D&D problem and address it with their designs. The fear of the dark is a powerful force, and to see it marginalized in games takes away a considerable part of the fear and unknown when exploring dungeons. It doesn't help when so many races in 5E have night vision and light sources get factored out of the game.

Low Fantasy Gaming does the 5E-style grimdark experience very well, and it also addresses the night vision issue by giving no races this ability. I love LFG's take on feats since you get to make the powers and abilities up yourself (with GM approval), and every character is unique. This game also tackles many of the 5E gripes and fixes them through pools and mechanics. LFG also has many exciting classes and powers, with this "savage survival" feeling that appeals to me more than stock 5E or Shadowdark and focuses on the wilderness and exploration along with dungeons. They renamed the spells, which is annoying and cool, but I get why they did it so I can play along.

These days, I look for longevity and publisher support in a game, and I love feeling. The Shadowdark game hits those notes, but I like LFG for my 5E-style old-school games, just for the gritty feeling and innovative mechanics. Whereas Shadowdark leans more toward the OSR and even games like Lion & Dragon, LFG leans in the direction of Cypher System and even Warhammer.

The mind-blowing Appendix N game with dangerous magic and incredible feats of heroism? Dungeon Crawl Classics is my best-in-class game for that. This is OSR gaming at its finest, with all sorts of strange dice and nothing ever being the same twice. DCC is another S-Tier game for me. I am not currently playing this, but just for inspiration alone, the game is incredible.

I am currently out of the market for random OSR games and taking stock after the January OGL disaster. Many games are abandoning the OGL, which is a good thing. The next one I am looking forward to is ACKS 2 since that game fills a Middle Ages niche that I love from a historical and 4X kingdom-building point of view. ACKS has a darkness and uniqueness that sets it apart from many of the AD&D clones, and the conflict against the "Conan-style old world" and the "civilized forthcoming new world" sets the stage for everything that comes after.

Work is continuing on ACKS 2 to remove the OGL from the game, and what I have seen so far is incredible. The game is going from a B/X-style game to its own standalone game. This gives me the same feeling OSE Advanced has; the game moved away from its B/X roots to become something of its own game with its own identity.

But I keep coming back to C&C. There are a lot of flash and hot games out there, new mechanics, and some beautiful art in the newer games. I keep returning to something stable, where everyone is welcome, and the game feels like the familiar one I grew up with. I don't want a lot of complex rules, so I am stepping off the Pathfinder 2 releases for now. I don't have the time or the group to play that. Also, many of the newer PF 2 releases do not speak to me; they feel pop-culture and anime-influenced, which is not what I look for in a dungeon game. They are fine, but not for me.

Castles & Crusades is one of my S-Tier games, quickly replacing Pathfinder 1e since it does everything much more manageably and cleaner than a 3.5-era set of rules. The options and multi-class features are the absolute best in the OSR, giving you so much flexibility in creating characters that it blows my mind. Multi-classing is so much better in C&C than 5E, and this is the old-school style where you can level up both classes simultaneously, not pick and choose levels.

Playing off a 3x5 card without having to open a book feels the most like old-school gaming, and C&C does that wonderfully while still keeping the feeling of AD&D at the table, but with a modernized and streamlined flow of play.

Swords & Wizardry Complete

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adventuredesigntome/swords-and-wizardry-complete-revised-rulebook

My heart is with Swords & Wizardry and the new Kickstarter. This is arguably the more important game to the OSR since it takes the version of the SRD rules released to the Creative Commons and rebuilds the entire game from that unassailable base. The project may use the ORC license and seeks to create a solid foundational game for 3rd-party support.

What I want in an OSR game post-OGL 2023 is something third-party publishers can build upon and support. Swords & Wizardry has always been that "OSR DNA" sort of game that many other games could be created from.

As for 5E-style modernized OSR games? I am lukewarm to them. 5E is such a behemoth at this point; playing anything like it - or with similar mechanics - feels like a diversion away from the elephant in the room. Whenever I played the 5E-like games, that feeling in the back of my head would never go away, "When are we going back to 5E again?"

I felt it with Low Fantasy Gaming, Advanced 5E, and anything else. I would feel it even with Shadowdark, but I congratulate them on their success and applaud them for their presentation and hard work. But to me, 5E will always be in the room.

And the OSR does not need 5E mechanics. I don't like the 5E advantage/disadvantage system, which has become overused and a bit too expected - and gamed - by players. The 5E mechanics don't work well in an old-school experience. There is a finality to beating an AC 13 on a to-hit roll and knowing you will miss that more than you will hit. I don't want players arguing for advantage. It is what it is.

It is good to see Swords & Wizardry back, and after the 2023 disaster, we are back to square one. The OSR has a superb new entry into the hobby - a fantastic little game called Swords & Wizardry.

And this game is out there for us to build a new future.

Using the things we know.

Science Fiction: The Sense of Wonder & Unknown

When comparing Starfinder with Numenera, I kept returning to the sense of wonder and the unknown. There is very little of the unknown in Starfinder; magic is magic, tech is tech, and I get the feeling "everything is known." If it isn't tech, it is magic - and we know both, so everything (outside of a plot) is known.

With Numenera, most of everything is unknown. You can pick up a strange artifact, know nothing about it, and be amazed when something incredible happens. Every time you play, the world could be dramatically different.

A lot of science fiction games fail this test. Star Frontiers, Traveller, Space Opera, Alien, and many other mainstream science fiction games have this "modern-day" in-space feeling, and the sense of mystery and wonder feels lacking. The Traveller game is a sort of; they have a "mystery of the ancients" subplot, but its effect on the game and mechanics is minimal.

Star Trek or GURPS has a sense of wonder if you play them right, but they feel like they default to an "everything is known" state and the effect on mechanics is minimal. I would put a lot of OSR games in this middle category, just since GM fiat with "strange magic effects with custom rules" tends to be a more significant thing in old-school modules.

Numenera, The Strange, Cypher System, Coriolis, Gamma World, Tales from the Loop, Call of Cthulhu, and surprisingly Dungeon Crawl (and Mutant Crawl) Classics have that sense of mystery and wonder, and this is reflected directly in mechanics - some more than others. In some games, there are corruption mechanics, or insanity can drive your character mad. Magic and technology are unpredictable. Some have strange artifacts you must examine to figure out what they do. In Numenera, the entire world is strange and needs to be discovered, and every game and interpretation of that world can be different.

Numenera kills it when it comes to wonder and amazement. It was so different; it felt like logging into Minecraft for the first time, not knowing what was going on, being unable to figure anything out, and quitting in frustration. This happened to me once, and then I learned things and fell in love with the game.

With many games, the only surprise lies in "what players don't know" in the treasures and monsters. We see book after book of "monsters we haven't fought yet" and "treasures we haven't seen." It feeds a content addiction, but also, this tells us the base game is devoid of rules for mystery and discovery. If all the mystery and discovery in a game is "how do we kill the next thing," I lose interest.

The game becomes a game of lifeless lists.

And many games die here for me.

Too many books, too many lists, and no room for imagination.

A lot of the fun and wonder has been lost. The feeling of discovery. The unknown. I get why some recoil at the genre when it gets too challenging and speculative. We want to return to the cave of our 5E builds, familiar rules, and our "sure things." It isn't easy or comfortable to "not know" anything. But to me, that is the heart of science fiction.

Many science fiction games are just math.

That isn't science fiction; that is math, rules, charts, and random tables painted like science fiction.

Starfinder sits in this strange space. Everything can be explained by magic or technology. It is fantastic and adventurous, but other than surprising me with a new race, item, or monster, it doesn't feel like much of the unknown is here.

And the blank space for my imagination feels filled in or quickly understood by magic or a skill roll. I can find it in a book if I don't know something. The game doesn't encourage me to make it up on my own, and free me from the chains of explanation.

Cypher: Starfinder

I love the Starfinder setting; the rules are one of the best 3.5-style science fiction games. I don't have the time to play it and manage all the characters I want to run. I tried, but when you struggle to run five characters with printouts of 4-5 pages each, you wonder if this much work is worth the trouble.

I have the same problem with Pathfinder 1 and 2. The games are far too in-depth for my time during the day, and the effort is not worth the fun I get from the system. I don't doubt the depth and detail are incredible for some players and groups; I played these and appreciate the incredible designs and options.

And I flip through the Starfinder adventures, and it is page after page of stat blocks for monsters. Yes, the challenge! But can we do better? Is roleplaying storytelling or World War II wargaming? If I want the ultimate tabletop experience, I will play Pathfinder 2.

My time with the Cypher System has really been an eye-opener. I plated rules-light narrative games such as FATE and Index Card RPG, and these are incredible games that keep character sheets simple while focusing on narrative flow. FATE is still a fantastic game, one of those classic pick-up-and-play gems.

Cypher is entirely different; it keeps play simple while providing a 5E level of depth in the character options. And it dispenses with monster stat blocks entirely. The characters aren't 4-5 page PDF printouts I feel endlessly waste paper. I can maintain sheets by hand.

With Cypher, I sit down, turn on some music, and play. Since the level of "GM prep" is near zero, I don't need to spend any time getting a dungeon laid out, encounters built, treasures stocked, monsters selected, and all sorts of flipping through GM books or adventures to begin. I use my solo-play oracle, generate some starting situations, and get playing as the Cypher System flow takes over, and "me as GM" is not rolling dice and just presenting the challenges. "Me as the player" is rolling the dice.

And if I want to rate challenges of anything from skill checks to monsters, it is all on the 1-10 scale.

What is that, those Starfinder space goblins? That would be a level 2 monster, and maybe the special ones with heavier weapons would do 4 damage on a hit. I do not need to look at stats, books, or special attacks and defenses. The low level of detail in the Starfinder game does not matter; only the general challenge level and the few special rules that may apply to a monster, such as special attacks and defenses or multiple attacks.

If I pick a monster token I know nothing about, I would guess the abilities or look it up in a book, but I keep the design fast and loose, using generalities to determine monster abilities. Weakness in an element would ease the elemental attack, whereas resistance would hinder the same. You could do elemental immunities. Armor. Special attacks. All of it is easily translated, and it is a more straightforward translation than games like GURPS or Savage Worlds.

I could use the Cypher System for the rules to play in the universe and tell stories. If I want the whole experience of the rules, I will use the rules. Right now, my playtime is minimal, and while I enjoy the whole experience of the Starfinder system, I just don't have the time to play it and maintain a collection of characters.

Is Starfinder compelling enough to play with another system? The big draw of Starfinder is the crunch and rules. The setting? It is good, but a part of me says if you want to play in that universe, use the Starfinder rules. You pay for the stat blocks and playtesting with the adventures, so you should use and appreciate them. So no, I won't convert.

I made this decision by reading the Dead Suns adventure path and realizing the structure of that module:

• 50% is combat with finely-tuned encounters
• 25% is exploration glue between combats (maps, etc.)
• 25% is guidance on the DC checks needed to progress the story for the first two

Throw out the rules, and you are mostly throwing out the adventure. So to be fair, this was made to play and show off how great Starfinder is, so it is unfair to replace rules and kinda-sorta play through a story that is the glue for the encounters. I also have a problem with many Paizo adventures; they tend to focus on combat more than discovery or problem-solving - but they play to their audience, of which I am a part, so I can't complain.

I could have 80-90% of the same science-fantasy experience with Numenera. What is missing? Starships? Add them in and do inter-system travel. Star elves or any of the fun races? Add them in. Again, I hit the quandary of conversions. How much of what you like or want about the system is there, really? I feel the same with settings like the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk; very little I like about those settings is tied to the setting itself. Dark Sun? A generic "fantasy desert survival" world with "dragon emperors" and their "sorcerer kings" painted with a roughly savage Conan-style brush would work for me. I could play that with anything from GURPS to Cypher System.

This is also the problem of current-day Wizards of the Coast. All they see is what is problematic about a setting, and they are blind to what makes a setting excellent and engaging. You could rebuild a 5E Dark Sun along the thinking I laid out, and there would not be anything problematic about it, and the setting would be re-engineered towards the flavor and fun of the original game world. Put "what is fun" on one side of the whiteboard and "what we would like to update" on the other. Make everyone oppressed by the evil rulers, and make the game about overthrowing them.

It is elementary to update these worlds, yet they don't do it.

But I feel the same way about Starfinder. My starship captain and about 4 NPCs form the group's core. None of them are strongly tied to Starfinder. As long as I have "space science fantasy" with a few "classic fantasy in space" tropes, that is 80-90% of what I want anyways. Numenera fits them well.

I am falling out of the conversion game and more just doing what I want these days or playing settings how they were intended to be played.

Cypher: One Note Characters

Ah, the Empathic Speaker who Entertains.

I was trying to create a bard character in Cypher System, and I came up with this combination, and she was heavily overloaded with social abilities but could not do much else.

She was a 'one note' character; please forgive the pun.

She couldn't do much else than break the will of people's minds in roleplaying and then assist in combat - cheering on other characters as they fought the bad guys. She could not make any potent attacks; all she did was cheerlead.

She felt useless in anything other than social situations, and then she completely blew those out.

So I redesigned her with an alternate ability, gave her a secondary that did not double up social, and let her make some combat moves. After that, she was 100% better, and I felt she could contribute in more situations than just social interaction.

She was weaker in social situations but still better than everyone else. The trade-off here is that she gained many new abilities to help out in combat and skill tasks and could contribute more towards the group's success in various situations.

This is one of those pitfalls in the system, especially for new players, where you would not know you fell into a one-note trap. Stop if you see something you pick, starting to double-up on powers and bonuses. Come up with an interesting secondary set of abilities and pick that instead. Is your bard sneaky? Does your bard animate objects into dancing forms when they play? Can your bard focus sound into powerful sonic attacks?

I see a few "let's play" videos about Cypher System, and I seen one where a player felt their character could not contribute meaningfully. This may be a character design issue, a refereeing issue - or both.

Don't be afraid to pause after your first few sessions, review characters with the players, and tweak their designs based on how things are going. This can be done through XP and buying abilities, but some designs can be so tragically one-note that they should be rethought, and the player's ideas about "what they are really doing in the game" factored into a design that makes the player happy.

Suppose you have a one-note bard like that, and the player is trying to sneak around and have fun being stealthy without any help from their character's abilities. That is a warning sign that a thoughtful redesign is needed to better reflect what the player wants from the game.

Cypher: Change the World

I ran a session of Cypher where, as an experiment, I handed out experience points like popcorn. I heard all sorts of stories online about the following:

• Players only spend XP on advancement.
• Groups keeping two totals of XP, one for character improvement and another for player intrusions.

And I am of the Savage Worlds mindset where "XP are bennies" the more I hand out, the faster, the better the game gets. And I was right.

What happened is something I did not expect; along with player intrusions, arcs, and rerolls, players were spending XP on the other 2 and 3 XP items:

• Narrow skills
• Short-term benefits
• NPC contacts
• Dwellings, money, artifacts, and titles

And the "cold start" of the game I expected for new characters became something else entirely: the players had a say in how the game started and what they wanted to see. They got an NPC contact and a home base. One of them learned a spell to balance out their contributions in combat. They had a few new arcs. The players did not hoard those points; they used them to help create an interesting starting situation and place in the game world.

They could have saved them all and got two increases, but they ended the session with 2-4 XP each. What they didn't get in "character improvement" was a massive slice of "game world improvement." They cemented their stories and place in the world in a compelling way none of my other players' starting scenarios did. And their start was more robust and compelling than the others, and their playthrough will have a deeper and more intricate connection to the world.

Also, while player intrusions are immediate narrative changes, I may allow the 2 XP "short-term benefit" to allow players to "change the map." Players could add a dungeon, cave, bandit fort, ruined temple, or any other adventure location to an area (with GM approval) with 2 XP spent. This counts as a "short-term benefit" because the dungeon could be cleared, and the benefit is XP and treasure. The same goes for "safe spots" such as a cave to create a camp in, a secluded area, or a short-term hideout the characters could use as a temporary home base. With the XP spent, give the place the benefit of the doubt when determining encounters and if enemies can find it.

All because I was not afraid to hand out XP, and my players were not afraid to spend them.

Cypher: The Best Game to GM?

I would put Cypher System and the incredible Index Card RPG in the category "best games to GM." These two game-changers redefine the concept of tabletop gaming and deconstruct the notion of traditional tabletop games into base concepts and rebuild the entire experience from there.

I love them so much since they break with the notion that tabletop RPGs need to be complex, with paragraphs of rules for specific things, such as a wild shape, and require encyclopedias of spells, treasures, gear, and monsters. My Pathfinder 2 collection is already the size of my entire Pathfinder 1 collection, with two shelves filled, and that game isn't stopping anytime soon. Some games get too big to play, and when I sit down to referee them, my mind blanks at the complexity and scope of all the material I need to master, and I end up not playing.

With Cypher and Index Card, I will walk by a table with my current game and a few character sheets on it, and I will sit down and begin playing for a while - without touching one book. I will update my journals, advance the story, and leave it there for the next time. I don't need to sift through paragraphs of specific rules for certain situations, such as weapon length and dual wielding. Some of these "big box" games get so deep into rules entire sections get exploited, and you can see the rules bloat in every update and edition.

I like Cypher/Numenera the best since the game realizes the "5E dream" of multiclass builds without needing multiclass builds. All of the best 5E powers are in there, a step simplified, and you get to mix and match different character types and power sources, along with your "base party role." Your character is this fantastic combination of powers, background, attitude, and ability that feels like a unique combo-build 5E character designed with a few hundred dollars of add-on supplements and over a thousand pages of reading and rules synthesis.

And Cypher lets you play any combination. Do you want a magic-using fighter? You got it. A mechanic who crafts robots? A thief-druid? A barbarian bard? Anything you can imagine, you can build - and you can also create the building blocks yourself. If the game is missing something, you can quickly create the framework of the power system you want to see in the game, and it is there.

In fact, any of my 4-page Starfinder builds could be more manageable in the Cypher game than in Starfinder. Starfinder is still in that Pathfinder 1e framework, and the classes and rules are incredibly involved and detailed. While Starfinder is a fun game, how I play it does not match how it is designed.

I do broad, sweeping swaths of narrative action and story, and the individual combat stats, AC, and hit points of one space goblin do not matter to me. I don't care; this one has AC 13, and that one has AC 14 and 5 versus 7 hit points. None of that fine detail matters to me. I love the characters and story, and what ends up happening is I will play a section of the story with my nose stuck in a book or flip through PDFs for half the session.

That play experience for a creative story-based person - especially in solo play - sucks.

You repeat it enough times and eventually end up not playing the game.

And I have a stack of character printouts an inch thick that feel like a waste, and I am probably shredding them all.

Statistically, there isn't a big difference between one point of AC and two hit points. Yet, here I am, spending 5 minutes every time looking up stats and making notes before every combat. for something where the variance in the rolls of a d20 and the weapon damage dice make a 1-point difference in AC and a few hit points meaningless.

Especially when compared to the story.

I like OSR games because I know the parts stuck in my head from playing them growing up, and I do not need book references during play. But still, even though I know it all, very little of it matters, and I do not care. I end up being stuck in the same old rigid classes, buying the same old set of chainmail, and swinging a longsword at an orc. I have lost interest in the classical d20 mechanics, which no longer mean much to me. They are just a means to a combat's end and do not interest me in gaming.

Numbers and math mean very little to me compared to stories.

Games that put story and narrative over mechanics excite me. But they can't be too abstract, such as FATE, because I lose interest. There is this sweet spot of structured character builds and that point where the game says, "make the rest up yourself," and that structure draws me in. The character sheets sit on a table, the promise of immediate fun draws me in, and the game is so easy to play no book reference is needed.

Do you wonder why mobile gaming outshines consoles when compared to revenue? It is all about accessibility. Cypher and Index Card are infinitely more accessible and easy to play. I love my console games, but they have a time and a place. Cypher gives me that "big box" game feeling in a pick-up-and-play package.